“…and that, my friends, was how I ended up wrestling a splinter out of my TA’s thumb.  Please don’t try it at home,” Herman Randolph enthused to the vast crowd of Betas before him as he paced the auditorium stage for his sixteenth minute, eliciting a wave of rolling chuckles from the grand space.  “But in seriousness, now, before I ask up the next speaker, I’d like to remind you of something.  I understand if it’s hard to believe now, but if you hear nothing else I say, hear this: you are mighty.  Every single one of you is more powerful than you can possibly imagine.  I know it might sound silly, or like something I pulled from a cheesy birthday card.  But I mean it, now more than ever.  This is a new age for us, and I think it’s not just us that stand on this stage today, but all of you, with your bright and eager minds prepped for learning, that demonstrate it better than any words can.  So I urge you all to go forth and give it everything you have, because your actions will speak volumes louder than any words I say to you today.”

            “Couldn’t agree more,” boomed the voice of an Alpha from the back of the room, shrouded in too much shadow to be identified.  “Words are meaningless.”

            “Right… yes, thank you for the support,” Herman said with an uneasy sarcastic chuckle, squinting into the room in an attempt to identify the statuesque female source of the interruption.

            “Not everyone’s words, obviously.  But certainly yours are,” the woman continued.

            “Anyway,” coughed Herman, electing to ignore her now.  “With this, I pass along the stage to…”

            “Us,” the feminine voice cut in a third time.  A perturbed murmur broke out from the audience of Alphas, and a couple hissed at the stranger to move away.

            Herman’s eyes darted to the back corners of the room, where he could see three uniformed guards already marching closer to the stage.  Keeping his cool, he tugged awkwardly at his collar as he watched the woman step into the light at last, revealing what appeared to be a black tactical suit with boots, gear belt, and sensible ponytail for her jet-black hair.  Her silvery eyes met his, and suddenly the man became colder than he’d recalled feeling in a long time.

            “Ma’am, please back away from the stage,” a guard warned from behind her as they advanced, hands hovering over their stun devices.

            “Who is us?” Herman boldly questioned, refusing to take the abrasion sitting down, like he had for his whole youth at the hands of Alphas.

            “Just call us Paradise.  And frankly, it’s just about time you passed it along,” Halle snidely hissed, ignoring the thin threat as she leaned over the stage, close enough that she could’ve blown onto Herman’s face.  “Because I’m sick of listening to your filthy Beta lips flap.”

            With a swift swat of her right hand like a cat batting a rodent, Halle flung the three-inch-tall medical professional across the width of the stage.

            The crowd of more than one hundred thousand Betas and one hundred Alphas fell silent as a dusky tomb from mortified shock, making most feel as though they’d accidentally stepped into a waking dream.  The various devices projecting a video feed of the auditorium to the more than three hundred Alphas in the spillover room had the same effect.

            Perhaps more so than any other place in the city, the bustling ivory interior of Aegis headquarters came to a screeching halt, as more than two dozen titanic defenders of the population witnessed the act on their monitors, the blood of every single immortal being running with a humbling chill.

            The woman in black tapped her ear and smiled as the guards now sprinted toward her with tasers brandished.  “Roger?  Gail?  Come on in and join the party.”

            At the back of the room, all the exits simultaneously burst open.  The attentions of the remaining seven guards in the room were instantly redirected as five more Alphas dressed in black entered.

            The next few seconds trudged by at a nightmarish crawl that melded into a cacophonous flurry of the combined terrified cries of thousands of witnesses.  The guards, quick as they were, were no match for the coordinated efforts of the six intruders in tactical gear, who set into a murderous dance that encircled and then downed the remaining security in a rain of bone-shattering blows and the odd spritz of blood.

            The Alpha teachers began rising from their chairs, rushing toward the group as a unit in hopes of distracting them, but their front line was instantly smacked back down with a few practiced blows and swished blades.  Still-screaming Betas rose en masse and bolted for the tiny metal doors lining the balconies, distraught teachers desperately trying to maintain some shred of order in the horrifying scene, only to find they’d already been locked by a tripped security measure, courtesy of Alice in the control room.

            “ENOUGH!” Halle bellowed with explosive aplomb, nearly bowling over half the Betas in attendance with her volume, and the audience all paused in their desperate effort to defend the room.  By now, the lethal accomplices had drawn firearms and had them trained on the Alpha teachers and chaperones, offering an abrupt end to any further retaliation.  “I’d been hoping we didn’t have to start out on the wrong foot for all this, but I can see now we’re in need of some clarity on the situation.  I need everyone.  Everyone… to return to their seats so we can get this moving along, as silently as possible.  Particularly Alphas.  It would be a great shame to have to harm any of you or your pets just for a foolish act of heroism.”

            There was a pause, as though the prisoners were weighing their options a final time, before everyone began moving toward their chairs again, the Alphas slowly backing away from the guns pointed at their foreheads.

            Here and there over the expanse of the room, pockets of distressed weeping rang out from the Beta balconies, but were mostly lost amidst the collective reseating.  A few minutes of chaos later, the room was back in a state of apparent regulation, save for the violently elevated heart rates of every soul in the room not wearing tactical gear.

            “Alice, you can go ahead and cut the feed.  I’m sure our big brothers and sisters have seen enough already to start running around like headless chickens.  Unlock the central passage only, and wait for my signal for the spillover,” Halle whispered into her earpiece, before raising her voice again to address the room.  “If all Alphas in the room could be so kind as to follow my two associates out to alternate accommodations, I’d be very appreciative.”

            There was another moment of rigid reluctance as Gail and Roger pushed open the door Alice had just electronically unlocked, and prepared to lead the crowd of Alphas out.  No one budged.

            “Oh, and when I say that, I mean right fucking now,” Halle spat poisonously to the stunned guests, in the process causing tens of thousands of Betas to descend into a paralyzed panic, and no small number of the younger students to wet themselves.

            Spurred by the roared outburst, the group shuffled slowly, clearly not wanting to be separated from the now-incredibly vulnerable population of three-inch occupants left in the room.  Several even stopped in their tracks, turning around and seemingly trying to summon the courage to speak out against Halle, but a quick blow to the back of the head from Gail’s overeager gun barrel corrected them.

            “There’s no need for this!” a woman called out from the crowd of Alpha teachers, her voice cracking.  She was already on the verge of tears.

            “The next person who talks out of turn will have a Beta or five on the bottom of my boot to answer to,” Halle announced with a sudden calm, and if the hollow silence hadn’t already been absolute, it was positively deafening now.  Just as the final Alpha was about to follow the others out the door, the lead intruder’s luminous grey irises locked on to her.

            “Wait.  That last one,” Halle said, pointing at the young woman in the back of the pack, who fearfully chanced a glance over her shoulder to confirm that she was being singled out.  The Alpha couldn’t have been much older than a high school graduate.  “Yes, you, with the curls.  Get back in here.  Stand by the wall with your hands at your sides, and don’t move.”

            The female Alpha nodded solemnly, and halted her exit from the room far faster than Halle was expecting to do as she was told, though it was shrugged off for the time being, as the leader’s attention was now left to fester with hungry amusement over the petrified cavalcade of three-inch hostages before her while the auditorium doors were electronically locked again.

            “And now that we’ve got the room to ourselves, little ones,” Halle sang in the most tender voice she could manage, steepling her fingers together greedily.  “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

            Meanwhile, in the tile sanctuary of the bathroom, Ben rubbed his reddened eyes and took a deep breath as he leaned against a wall.  He threw a few handfuls of cold water from the sink against his warm cheeks and stared disdainfully at his wiry frame in the mirror, at last getting up the gumption to join his classmates.

            “Okay, Mom.  Okay, Dad.  Here goes nothing,” he sighed with a resigned shrug.  “I can be… anything.  Yeah, right.”